Working with failed Array RAID 5 E200

We have 4 x SATA drives in a RAID5 array controlled by a HP E200 controller.

We had a failed drive but couldn't get the controller to recognise any drive in the faulty port. Have tried new cables and controller port (no backplane) and finally changed the controller in order to try and rebuild the array.

I managed to get the array to be recognised, albeit in the failed state, in a new controller. Im just reinstalling the OS on a separate drive not running through the RAID card (PCI) and with the few times I've powered it on and off it now shows logical drives as 0 when it's initialising.

I've now got 2008 R2 running on the old ML110 G5 server and have installed the HP Array Configuration Utility but in there it just shows all the drives as ok and shows them all as unassigned drives which scares me to death as i have no backup of the data.

How can I best attempt to rebuild this, I'm not very competent with these arrays so apologise if i've missed something obvious.

If you have no backup then RAID Reconstructor from www.runtime.org is what I would use, but the drives (or images of them) have to be on a non-RAID controller for that since it is a software de-striping

Sadly not, the OS drive failed so I'm having to reinstall it, and chose 2008 instead of 2003. I could try the old controller card though, not sure whether i'm supposed to move the cache module with it, I did when i swapped it and it did see the 2 logical arrays properly, even though it was in a poor state it was still readable, but not failed altogether.

The raid was just for the data. OS was on a separate drive which also failed, its been limping along for a while until i finally tried to sort it but hadn't expected to lose the array otherwise i would have tried to backup. The OS drive failed during the restarts after swapping the controller card.

I can now see the logical drive on booting the machine. But the ACU (GUI) reports the array as failed. I think somehow it needs to be unfailed? I'm also struggling to find the controller on the HP site to grab the CLI version of ACU which I'm guessing I need.

If you have no backup then RAID Reconstructor from www.runtime.org is what I would use, but the drives (or images of them) have to be on a non-RAID controller for that since it is a software de-striping tool.

Ok will give that a try, but i had hoped there might be a way of getting the E200 to un-fail and go back to being degraded, is this not an option? It does now say 1 Logical drive on boot up after spinning the drives up, it's just that it shows failed

This isn't what it normally does, the replacement controller should read the config off the 3 good disks and show you the same as it was showing with the controller which had a SAS lane to one of the disks down. I presume you didn't connect the new (probably blank) disk since the old controller had never seen that before. All 3 working disks on their original cables?

i did connect the new blank disk to the 4th slot on the new card, is that what's screwed it all up do you think? i have since put just the three drives back into the original card, it shows 1 logical drive when it detected them again but it shows them as failed. i've just had the raid recreator try and identify them but it said it was inconcusive but i ran with it anyway as i dont have anything to lose. its now using getdataback to try and recover whatever it can but says it will be another 18 hours checking it out, then i assume i'll have to write it out somewhere which will no doubt take another day! Just restoring from backups which stopped in september last year and no-one told us.......... thanks for trying to help its really appreciated

Its worth noting that their solution didn't work with the HP (RAID Recreator) I had to send a RAIDprobe file off to them for them to work out the way the data was striped etc. But that worked a treat and saved me big time. Thanks.

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